Coral Finance Reentrancy Attack

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While there is limited information available online, the Coral Finance is another example where a project with a smart contract hot wallet was breached and user funds were lost. In this case, the exploit was related to the way EOS uses wRAM. It does not appear that anything was done to assist affected users in this case, as the project appears to have disappeared.

This is a global/international case not involving a specific country.

About Coral Finance

"Earn Coral tokens by staking Tokens or providing liquidity." "In most cases, you will have to stake your LP tokens to receive rewards, like on Coral.network. If you stake your LP tokens, it means that you’re kind of renting out the rights to withdraw your liquidity to the platform. However, you can typically reclaim your LP tokens at any time if you want to get your liquidity back."

DefiBox Foundation released the following statement concerning Coral, “Coral Finance is independently developed by the community, it has completed multi-signature of contract and open source code. The Defibox Foundation appreciates this. Therefore, after the Coral Finance project contacted Defibox Foundation, we decided to support it.“

"The wRAM of the EOS ecological DeFi liquidity mining project Coral was attacked by hackers and lost more than 120,000 EOS."

"On September 10, the wRAM of the EOS ecological DeFi liquidity mining project “Coral” was attacked by hackers and lost more than 120,000 EOS."

This is a global/international case not involving a specific country.

The background of the exchange platform, service, or individuals involved, as it would have been seen or understood at the time of the events.

Include:

Known history of when and how the service was started.
What problems does the company or service claim to solve?
What marketing materials were used by the firm or business?
Audits performed, and excerpts that may have been included.
Business registration documents shown (fake or legitimate).
How were people recruited to participate?
Public warnings and announcements prior to the event.

Don't Include:

Any wording which directly states or implies that the business is/was illegitimate, or that a vulnerability existed.
Anything that wasn't reasonably knowable at the time of the event.

There could be more than one section here. If the same platform is involved with multiple incidents, then it can be linked to a main article page.

The Reality

This sections is included if a case involved deception or information that was unknown at the time. Examples include:

When the service was actually started (if different than the "official story").
Who actually ran a service and their own personal history.
How the service was structured behind the scenes. (For example, there was no "trading bot".)
Details of what audits reported and how vulnerabilities were missed during auditing.

What Happened

The specific events of the loss and how it came about. What actually happened to cause the loss and some of the events leading up to it.

Key Event Timeline - Coral Finance Reentrancy Attack
Date	Event	Description
September 9th, 2020 12:00:00 AM	First Event	This is an expanded description of what happened and the impact. If multiple lines are necessary, add them here.

Total Amount Lost

The total amount lost is unknown.

How much was lost and how was it calculated? If there are conflicting reports, which are accurate and where does the discrepancy lie?

Immediate Reactions

How did the various parties involved (firm, platform, management, and/or affected individual(s)) deal with the events? Were services shut down? Were announcements made? Were groups formed?

Ultimate Outcome

What was the end result? Was any investigation done? Were any individuals prosecuted? Was there a lawsuit? Was any tracing done?

Total Amount Recovered

It is unknown how much was recovered.

What funds were recovered? What funds were reimbursed for those affected users?

Ongoing Developments

What parts of this case are still remaining to be concluded?

Prevention Policies

There are a number of ways to prevent and mitigate this situation. It is far more secure to have the majority of funds in a multi-signature wallet where keys are stored offline by multiple operators. This would limit the potential loss to only those funds being actively needed. Audits can be used to reduce the risks on the hot wallets further, and we advocate at least 2 reviews would be required prior to a project launch. Having known platform operators would ensure a best effort is made to assist them, with a comprehensive industry insurance fund as a fallback in the worst case.